William Wittman Maxes Monitoring with ORIA Mini

New York, NY (July 6, 2026)—You’ve heard William Wittman’s work; the Grammy-winning producer, engineer and mixer has captured the sound of innumerable artists—Cyndi Lauper, Joan Osborne, The Outfield, Patty Smyth, Pat Benatar, Graham Parker and The Fixx are just some of the acts he’s worked with over the years. How he hears artists, however, has changed with the latest addition to his workspace—an Audient ORIA Mini.

For years, Wittman has used Sonarworks software to balance out his New York mixing space. He explains, “I was already happy with how much easier Sonarworks made working in my little home mixing room,” he explains. “My room isn’t perfect, but with the aid of Sonarworks on my monitors, it translates well to Sterling Sound, who does my mastering, and I can trust working in here.”

However, running calibration software directly inside a DAW always introduced a minor workflow hurdle: It required a strict routine of adding the plug-in to the stereo bus and remembering to switch it off before rendering the final track.

“Although I’d developed the habit of putting Sonarworks on my stereo bus and then inactivating it when I go to bounce mixes, that’s still a bit of an additional step to remember and one more potential mistake at the end of mixing,” he notes. “It’s not a huge problem, but it’s a minor annoyance. In mixing, I really want my head in the creative process as much as possible, so naturally anything that offers one less thing to think about, or potentially forget, is a plus.”

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The solution came when he moved the processing away from his computer’s CPU and onto the dedicated hardware DSP of the ORIA Mini. By loading his calibration profiles directly onto the unit, Wittman removed the master-bus hassle entirely.

“The ORIA Mini was incredibly easy to set up and integrate into my system, and between the software and the video walk-through, I was up and running in about a half hour, including re-sweeping my room,” says Wittman. “The process is so transparent that at first I found myself checking, bypassing and re-installing Sonarworks via the ORIA Mini, just to reassure myself it was on! It’s frankly a pleasure to just have my Sonarworks curve applied to my speakers via the ORIA Mini without my having to even think about it. It’s just there.”

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With the technical management handled externally, Wittman stays in the zone when working on projects, a slate that includes expanded reissues by punk-pop pioneers Too Much Joy, ongoing work with Lauper and more. Wittman notes, “I recently completed mixing a new album for alternative band Wonderlick here and the best thing I can say about having the ORIA Mini running Sonarworks in the background is that I can just work and forget it’s even there.”